It should come as no surprise that the lemmy.ml [http://lemmy.ml] admin team
took about 2 minutes to decide to pre-emptively block threats / Meta. Their
transparent and opportunistic scheme to commodify the fediverse and it’s users
will not be allowed to proceed. We strongly encourage other instance...
This is not particularly surprising. Lemmy was started as an anti-corporate project by leftists after /r/chapotraphouse got quarantined and later banned (subreddit for the most popular podcast and most donated patreon at the time), with the explicit goal of preventing corporate control from being able to silence leftists when they're blasting off. CTH was skyrocketing in subscribers at the time it was quarantined on August 8th 2019, and when even quarantining didn't stop its growth or slow down its activity afterwards Reddit pulled the plug under the excuse it promoted violence, but the only particularly edgy thing ever said there was "slave owners should be killed" and support for John Brown. This evolved post-ban into the assessment that Spez banned it because he wants to own slaves.
When that happened there was a massive shift in the leftist parts of reddit as we very quickly realised we'd be targeted if reddit ever deemed us to be too successful, and projects like Lemmy began in reaction. CTH's community in fact moved to Lemmy 3 years ago, and resides on Hexbear.net but has not yet joined the rest of federated lemmy due to technical issues (it used to be a fork with a different front end).
Given lemmy's specific anti-corporate origins seeing Lemmy.ml do this should surprise nobody. It's the correct move anyway.
I am proud of Lemmy.ml for defederating. The second I find out if kbin social or lemmy world defederate or not I will just move to the other one since I use both.
(Edit turns out Lemmy.ml is run by Tankies and also allows federation with lemmygrad.)
I don't really think federating with them is doomsday, tbh (though I go back and forth on this one), but that doesn't affect my primary reason for my nope. Threads consolidates everything I hate about corporate social media--and for that matter, all social media--without a single part I actually liked and made dealing with the other parts worth it. This is not a twitter clone; it's like someone asked chatGPT to create a social media network based on twitter for other chatGPT bots to talk to each other. For fuck's sake, it doesn't think its users should control what they see on their own feed.
I am perfectly willing--even eager--to perform melodramatically about things that annoy me in public for fun and when I'm bored and applaud others doing the same; it's fun times for all and possibly my favorite thing ever. This is not that.
Threads makes my skin crawl on concept. This is not 'they do not align with our values' because come on, Fediverse contains a multitude of values and invents more and i bet if asked, everyone here would list off a different set of values they believe encompass Fediverse and now I'm tempted to see because it would be hilarious. But we can't even get that far; Threads has no values. This would be a marriage of convenience to a real doll fueled by Facebook's algorithms and sponsored by Wal-Mart; whether or not it's a danger to Fediverse shouldn't even have come up because the first question that should be on anyone's minds is 'wait, this is actually a serious question?' and have been answered 'lol of course it's a joke, I just forgot to add the /s'.
It's not about Zuckerberg, it's about the userbase. With something that grew to 30 million users literally overnight, it's impossible to determine what it will be like, and how it will mesh with the existing fediverse content/users.
With something this scale, it only makes sense to secure and observe - pre-emptively block, watch the content, maybe even poll the users on what should be done. There is nothing to be lost this way, it's only a cautious approach towards a potential later link.
What could be lost is the Threads community overwhelms the lemmy community before there is a chance to react (it is 1000x bigger, after all). It makes sense to be cautious, here.
This isn't inconveniencing anyone, any user can make an account on Threads as well and use both right now.
Look, Mark has royally screwed up Facebook. Any respect or honor with the guy has long been lost. Why even give him a second chance when it's obvious he's going to do the same thing with Threads?
His Metaverse failed.
His Facebook/Meta thing failed.
He is a huge red alert to be involved or close to the very things we're trying to recover and escape to from things he has contaminated. Why chance associating with him?
Ideologically, de-federating an instance just because you don't like the guy running it would be a bad thing, but Facebook/Meta has been just so toxic to the internet as a whole it's hard to really find fault with it.
I don't know. I would like to subscribe to someone on Threads from Mastodon (since both are Twitter alternatives), if they don't have Mastodon account (which let's be honest they probably don't). Zuck does not get any of my data (besides what's available publicly anyway). If Threads decides to go full EEE, I'll stop getting updates from people on Threads, same as I don't get updates from people on IG right now. I think proliferation of ActivityPub protocol would be the greatest advantage.
Moreover, I think we should follow the email architecture - I might use i.e. Proton Mail, but it does not prevent me from sending emails to Gmail, which I think is a bad provider, who collects a lot of user data. In fact if Proton Mail forbade sending email to Gmail I would be really displeased about that.
The goal is to allow people to choose where they want to go and ActivityPub is what can help with that, unlike blocking Threads.
Very good news. Between Pi Hole and uBlock Origin, any links to threads is already blocked on my computer. Nice to see you folks preventing the linking to this privacy invading boil of the internet
Well done. I hope more of the fediverse follows suit. Facebook has a long way to go to restore trust -- if that's possible at all. They're nowhere near that threshold yet.
When companies like META show you how ruinous they are the first dozen times, over and over without end, you believe them, and you defend yourself, or you deserve every bad thing that's going to happen to you, when they repeat their corporate driven ends at your expense
I'm on the fence here. Luckily, at least, I think community/subreddit-based sites like Lemmy/Reddit don't have "network effects" that are as "sticky" as Mastodon/Twitter, because with Lemmy/Reddit you don't need to build up a follower list to start getting value. You just join the community and it's as if you immediately "followed" a bunch of people who share your interests. You don't even need to make an account - you can just bookmark a community and lurk, and maybe you eventually make an account to start interacting. It's a great "on-ramp" - very low barrier to entry/usefulness.
I think that's why Lemmy was able to take off so fast. It relies on community-level coordination, rather than every individual user having to make their own choice to switch, and try to get all their followers/followees to switch. So even if Meta did add a community-style mode, I don't think it'd eat into the Lemmy userbase. It is hard to be sure though, and I respect the choices of those instances that have blocked/defederated.
Mastodon admins have a harder decision to make I think - there's an opportunity to get very quick growth by effectively adding a lot more followable users/content. A bunch of people don't like Meta/Facebook, but want to follow their friends, and so they may use Mastodon to do that, which could get a lot more people to move to "real" fediverse apps/sites like Mastodon. I know a lot of people that are on Threads now, and I'm looking forward to being able to follow them from Mastodon, rather than being forced to get Threads to keep up to date with what they're working on.
There we go. Not the wishy washy mastodon non-announcement. Although I understand their "neutrality" too, it's still like they wanna seem like the big boys. Sometimes it's advantageous to be small. This "fuck you" may be just adorable to Zuck, but it's also genuine.
(Apparently) Unpopular Opinion: I think defederating Threads is the wrong move, because it just locks people into Threads. If people on Twitter had the ability to move to Mastodon AND still interact with all the people they did before, I think we would have seen even more people move. The only reason I still check twitter at all is because I have a few close friends who didn't move. Meta is likely going to have big adoption of people who aren't ready to go to Mastodon, but are interested in getting out of the dumpster-on-fire that twitter seems to continue to be. But blocking those people from being able to join the more popular Lemmy instances, given no actual policy violations, just will keep people in Meta that otherwise could leave. With the "however" being: It's not quite clear to me that Threads users will be interacting with Lemmy as much Mastodon, if Threads were a Reddit replacement, it's more directly connected.
I don't generally judge people based on their appearance, but this man's face gives me the heebie-jeebies. There's something alienating about the lack of affect he seems to have, plus his features seem to be an approximation of a human face - the mouth is too small, the ears too big, the forehead too shiny...
How does that work? Is threads using a protocol compatible to lemmy?
(And I fully agree with the preemptive blocking of any facebook stuff).
Edit: thanks for all the detailled answers.
So Facebook tries the old EEE - Embrace Extend Extinguish.
1.A big company is Embracing an open source standard ("we're friendly, see?) They get a lot of users that way - even the open source savvy types.
2.they start Extending that standard "to make it even better" - but not talking about these changes with the rest of the community first. They cannot react quickly enough and become incompatible with the new version of this standard.
3.Extinguish. When all the users are effectively using the big companies platform with something that isn't the original standard anymore they change it so much that it isn't compatible at all anymore or replace it completely.
Not sure what to think of this honestly. Like imagine a small email provider decided to block Gmail, that's a death sentence. It's impossible to get people to switch apps when they have to leave behind all of the content and people they used an app to interact with. And let's be honest, threads is going to run at a loss for a long time to grow their userbase before they start pulling weird shit. We need to have a migration path when that happens, and if threads is blocked everywhere, people will lose their content and contacts upon switching, so they won't do it.
I don't really get this. I see people were worried about Threads app/web app permissions (which I signed up and no permissions were granted immediately beyond notifications). Regardless, wouldn't staying federated with threads.net allow everyone to interact with them all from the more reasonably permissioned app of their choice, like Jerboa?
Yeah, the problem here as I see it is that just the same as Twitter, this social media service is still owned by a single owner corporation who is running the service for a profit and they will eventually sell user data or bastardize the service. Ive been on the internet for 30 years, social media and websites come and go and so does their popularity.
Which raises another point, how are the bills being paid for with any of these services, including lemmy? TAANSTAFL.
While the title may be clever, Threads is an Instagram creation, not one of Facebook, and while both are products of Meta, Facebook content (and even Instagram content) and Lemmy content would never co-mingle.
why would you move from twitter, it is truly a more open forum now, dont care what views you have free speech should be the same for every one. people have thin skin and that just leaves them naturally as targets.
Generally disagree. If you want the Fediverse to become a large open standard, if not the largest, then this is going to just be a matter of course. Companies will seek to commodify all their offerings, whether they use open standards or not. Many exist that commodify on top of open-source software and open standards. The important part is to ACHEIVE the open standard to begin with, and I think it's short-sighted to pre-emptively block something that could be a strong item down that path, and before it might show itself to be more harmful towards that goal.
It can always be blocked later, situation-depending.
I disagree with the prevailing sentiment here. Meta using ActivityPub is going to help ActivityPub grow an will be good for federated platforms like lemmy, and mastadon.
Lemmy should not block threads.net. Individual users can simply opt out of using threads, but it's good if we can communicate with people using it and they can communicate with us using a decentralized, free, standard.
What is the threat? Isn't it good that the fediverse is becoming more mainstream? If thread users can communicate with us, it will be easier for them to join us.
Don't see why people are doing this. You'll just damage the fediverse and discourage meta from federating, granting them their own walled garden that you cannot use without selling your soul to them, which is going to dissuade people from using Mastodon as what's the point if people on threads cannot see what they have